Albert, arguing, said, You’re wrong. Folks don’t care if politicians lie and steal – they expect them to do that. What’s more, they’ll vote for a crook who can fix the potholes in their street over a bungling saint every time.

I chalked that up to an otherwise garrulous man’s streak of skepticism but Eric the lawyer said, You took a couple hundred polls this year and your conclusion is we prefer crooks to saints – that’s discouraging. It looks like folks would at least be a little worried about what else the crook might steal.

Albert grinned. Shrugged. Said, They all steal.

Up in New York, the bluest of states, last week an Obama supporter published an editorial in the New York Times saying Mitt Romney is the most dishonest candidate ever to run for President. At the same time, across the country, a Romney supporter in red-state Indiana called Barack Obama spiteful, petty and second rate in Real Clear Politics.

During the summer Obama’s folks ran an ad saying a man’s wife died of cancer because Romney closed his mill, leaving him without health insurance – and Republicans ran an ad with Obama saying what sounded like, ‘If you own a business, you didn’t build it.’

There wasn’t a lot of truth in either ad but if you try telling that to either a Romney or Obama supporter – you’ll run head-on into a stone wall.

It’s hard to tell if politicians are more dishonest now than, say, a hundred years ago but it does seem clear this is one election where regular folks aren’t letting a little duplicity stand in their way – as long as the potholes get fixed.

Comments

One comment on “Humorless”

And which candidate has actually fixed any potholes lately? The one presiding over chronic 8% unemployment? It seems to me that people were willing yesterday to elect a guy who’s better at creating potholes than fixing them, even when you give him a trillion dollars to stimulate some action.